I think we should start with ...

Revitalize Our Public Education System

An underfunded, understaffed, and neglected American public school system will never make our country great again. With buildings in disrepair nationwide, we must enable local governments to remodel or replace our most vital resource and restore hope to our nation's youth.

Education empowers the youth of today and the leaders of tomorrow with a love of learning, a sense of inquisitiveness, and ambition to reach beyond the status quo. If our democracy is to function well, we need to have people who are able to think, explore, imagine, and engineer or country's future.

Without quality education for ALL of America's youth, we cannot expect to maintain our competitive edge in business, finance, technology, math, and sciences.

NCLB & its high stakes testing are the wrong way to go; teachers have to teach to the test for fear of their schools losing funds due to students bad performance, so they pressure kids to learn test-taking, a specialized skill that is needed for SAT's but should not be stressed so much throughout schooling instead of mastery of the three R's at each kids own rate based on gender, learning style.

We need a rigorous, compassionate, creative education system. Standardization has a role, but can be taken too far and stifle the ability to individualize. We need classroom educators to have a voice in making education policy.

The National Education Board needs to be disbanded, and education must be done locally.

Additionally, by helping to reduce the government-monopoly on education we will allow the profit-motive to bring us more innovation in education which I believe will ultimately lower the cost of education for all.